A primary drawback of utilizing a satellite-based video system to provide video to a motor vehicle is the general lack of time diversity in such systems. While certain systems have implemented complex tracking antenna subsystems to optimize the time that a video signal is available to a mobile receiver, such systems have been generally incapable of mitigating signal loss attributable to such signal blockage by obstacles, such as overpasses. While certain systems, such as satellite digital audio radio service (SDARS) systems, have been architected to mitigate signal loss due to obstacles, in that the SDARS system were designed to include time diversity, the addition of time diversity in an SDARS system is not without cost, as the information is essentially transmitted twice. It should be appreciated that this reduces the amount of data bandwidth available in the system and generally requires multiple transmitters.
Today, a number of different video receiver systems have been proposed and/or designed to render video from multiple sources. For example, at least one video receiver system has been implemented or proposed that can render different video formats, such as SDARS video, digital video broadcast-satellite (DVB-S) video and national television system committee (NTSC) video. Other robust wireless video technologies, such as digital video broadcast-handhelds (DVB-H), digital video broadcast-terrestrial (DVB-T), MEDIAFLO™ (QualComm), VCAST™ (Verizon) and integrated services digital broadcast-terrestrial (ISDB-T) are currently under development. Unfortunately, mobile video receivers that utilize streaming video technology have displayed sub-standard blocky, frozen video, when data is not received correctly. One solution to this problem would be for a DVB system to replicate a desired satellite signal with another redundant satellite signal similar to the SDARS system. However, this is a relatively expensive proposition in both hardware cost (for new satellites) and in bandwidth cost (in that new frequencies would be required).
What is needed is a technique to address frame loss in a video stream that can be implemented in a relatively economical manner.